Is Star Wars Scifi?
2024-04-12
🍿 3 min. read
tags: scifi,publishedI frequently see people arguing over whether Star Wars is true science fiction or not, and what its true genre actually is. To “normies”, Star Wars is just your average, geeky show that features cool epic space battles, even cooler visuals (seriously, I could talk about the visuals for HOURS), and lest I forget to mention the light sabers. Star Wars has had such a huge and significant impact on western culture that even those who live under a rock are aware of it.
Defining Genres
Hell, there are no real hard set rules that define a specific genre, let alone any that define a sub-genre in its entirety, but I feel like we should loosely establish what we mean by “Science Fiction” and “Fantasy” before moving on.
There are two different widely accepted types of scifi; Hard scifi and Soft scifi. Soft SciFi puts most of its emphasis on the “soft sciences”, a colloquial term used within the scientific community to describe the sciences that deal with the intangibles of human behaviour, such as psychology, abstract thought, sociology, anthropology, and anything else that falls under that umbrella. On the other hand, hard scifi explores the “hard sciences”, typically known as physics, biology, chemistry, and anything that can be ‘objectively’ proven time and time again. Everything within a hard scifi setting is consistent to the laws of real life and/or the lore of the universe, and often time is taken to thoroughly explore the technology and inner workings of the world. A well known soft scifi is Star Trek, famous for dealing with subjects particularly political of the era (see “Plato’s Stepchildren”; the first episode to air on national US television that featured an interracial kiss!!) I prefer to go by Asimov’s definition of scifi though; “Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.”, which i feel most accurately describes the genre as a whole.
Fantasy is a genre in which imagination and creativity play a big part in forming the world. Common themes which explore the realm of the impossible, such as magical elements and fictional creatures are often present and the focus of the story. Much like scifi, fantasy also has two dominant subgenres, high fantasy, and low fantasy. A low fantasy setting would be one where the magical elements are added to our already existing reality; the world is analogous to ours. A good example of this is the Harry Potter series. The base setting is England, and the fantasy themes were added on top of the primary world. A high fantasy story would be set in a "secondary world". JJR Tolkien defined this as a world that was created in the process of "subcreation".
Both Science Fiction and Fantasy fall under the umbrella catergory "Speculative Fiction", which encompasses all types of writing that deviates from reality.
Only the Sith deal in absolutes.
"Yeah, I had the outline so I kind of knew how the dots connected, but then there's a whole story that has to fit around that, then you have to sort of make.. turn that into, you know, another six hours of film, when all that it really is is just a little backstory of what the Jedi were like and what the Republic was like and what the relationship of Obi-Wan and Darth Vader was, and obviously, Luke and Leia's relationship to Darth Vader. The emperor. What is the Empire... Thing about making a movie like this is you have to create a whole world.. in this particular case I guess it's a whole universe.. but all the Customs, all the politics, all the history, all the character motivations, everything has to be created and since it's based on a very kind of old story and not a high-tech story it's more of a fantasy film than a science fiction film" - George Lucas
Personally, if i was forced to classify it, i would say it was fantasy in a science fiction setting. But the person next to me might have a hardset opinion that star wars is a fantasy. But the person next to the person next to me might think of Star Wars as science fiction.
There is no way to fit it into such an undefined, cramped box. Think of it as a spectrum; pure fairy tale being at the very left of the wing, and the hardest scifi being at the very right of the wing. Star Wars would fit somewhere in the middle.
That being said, classification is unnecessarily restrictive. Enjoy your science fiction space fantasy opera whatever-ya-want-to-call-it show; you're a nerd regardless.